The Racist Mind in Society

American Behavioral Scientist
http://abs.sagepub.com
An Ethnographer Looks at Neo-Nazi and Klan Groups: The Racist Mind Revisited
RAPHAEL S. EZEKIEL
American Behavioral Scientist 2002; 46; 51
DOI: 10.1177/0002764202046001005
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AMERICAN
EZEKIEL
/ THE
BEHAVIORAL
RACIST MIND
SCIENTIST
REVISITED
An Ethnographer Looks at
Neo-Nazi and Klan Groups
The Racist Mind Revisited
RAPHAEL S. EZEKIEL
Harvard School of Public Health
The author re-examines his fieldwork with neo-Nazi and Klan leaders and followers. He first
reviews primary findings: official movement ideology expressed crude social Darwinism
and an apocalyptic struggle between Whites (humans) and Jews (children of Satan); everyday beliefs of members spoke more of a fear that they, as Whites, were going to be economic
losers; leaders were intelligent, shallow men, and at core were political beings motivated
more by a drive for power than by racism; members were male, young, dropouts without
work skills, with a deep fear of personal annihilationsocial isolates whose membership
expressed personal needs that might be satisfied equally by alternative engagements. The
article next asks how a working-class youth becomes a neo-Nazi activist and identifies social
and personal factors, relating them to other research. It draws implications for prevention,
looking at community organizing and education, and then at the relation of militant White
racism to ordinary White racism.
Americans today often learn about Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan through television clips of rallies or marches by men uniformed in camouflage garb with swastika armbands or in robes. These images often carry commentary implying that
the racist people are particularly dangerous because they are so different from
the viewer, being consumed by irrationality. The racists and their leaders are
driven by hatred, it is suggested, and one can scarcely imagine where they come
from or how to impede them.
Over 4 years, the author of The Racist Mind: Portraits of American NeoNazis and Klansmen (Ezekiel, 1995) met about once a week with the young
members of a neo-Nazi group in Detroit, periodically holding semistructured
interviews with the members and the somewhat older group leader. Over 3 years,
he interviewed at length national and middling leaders in the neo-Nazi and Klan
movement and attended and observed movement gatherings such as the Aryan
Nations national conclaves in Idaho, the regional Klan assembly at Stone Mountain, Georgia, and cross burnings in Michigan. At these gatherings, the writer
talked with participants, listened to their conversations with one another, and
AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST, Vol. 46 No. 1, September 2002 51-71
2002 Sage Publications
51
52
AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST
listened alongside the participants to the speeches of the movement leaders. The
resulting volume describes leaders, followers, and gatherings and employs
lengthy quotations from transcripts to buttress reflections on the White racist
movement and the meaning of membership in the militant groups. The first half
of this article reviews those findings; the second half, beginning with the discussion of Becoming a Neo-Nazi, considerably extends the books reflections, particularly suggesting steps that would make youth less susceptible to recruitment
by racist organizers. It will close with comments on our own social
responsibilities.
The methodological core of this work was candor. I was open with my
respondents about my identity: That I was a Jew, a leftist, and a university professor. I was direct about my agenda: That I believe (as I do) that most people
build for themselves lives that make sense to themselves, and that in my work, I
go to people whose lives seem strange to others and ask them to relate to me in
their own words the sense of their lives. I told them that I would be using their
own words to let others see their meaning, adding my own thoughts. Most people whom I approached were cooperative. (It is relevant that my skin is Caucasian pale. Although I told them that I was a Jew, I did not resemble their rather
medieval image of a Jew.)
MOVEMENT SIZE
The militant White racist movement is far from monolithic; it is a loose confederation of small groups made coherent by the organizing work of major leaders and united by common ideology. The Southern Poverty Law Center (2000a)
reported that in 1999, there were 36 Klan organizations (with a total of 138 chapters), 21 neo-Nazi organizations (130 chapters), and 10 racist skinhead organizations (40 chapters). The Klan was once the anchor of the movement and kept
its distance from the Nazi organizations as they emerged, but since the 1980s,
the two sets of organizations have more or less merged in what some have called
the Nazification of the Klan. Concepts and symbols are mixed indiscriminately
among the various groups.
Membership estimates were available in 1994 from reliable monitoring organizations: The Center for Democratic Renewal (D. Levitas, personal communication, autumn 1994), the Southern Poverty Law Center (D. Welch, personal
communication, autumn 1994), and the American Jewish Committee (K. Stern,
personal communication, autumn 1994) estimated hard-core membership in the
militant White racist movement at 23,000 to 25,000. Of these, 5,500 to 6,000
belonged to one or another of the Klans; 3,500 were skinheads; and 500 to 1,000
were in Nazi groups or in groups close to the Nazis. The remainder of the hard
core was less easily identified; the Center for Democratic Renewal referred to
them as the Christian Patriot Movement; they were to be found in politically
active churches of the Christian Identity sect and in rural groups scattered across
EZEKIEL / THE RACIST MIND REVISITED
53
the country. The monitoring groups estimated that 150,000 sympathizers bought
movement literature, sent contributions to movement groups, or attended rallies,
whereas another 450,000 people who did not actually purchase movement literature did read it. The movement is small but has had impact beyond its size
because of a reputation based on a history of violence.
MOVEMENT IDEOLOGY
The movements ideology emerged as one interviewed leaders, listened to
their speeches, and read movement newspapers and pamphlets. Two thoughts
are the core of this movement: That race is real, and those in the movement are
Gods elect. Race is seen in 19th-century terms: race as a biological category
with absolute boundaries, each race having a different essencejust as a rock is
a rock and a tree is a tree, a White is a White and a Black is a Black.
Whites are civilization builders who have created our modern world, both its
technology and its art. People of color are civilization destroyers, most characteristically showing their essences in the social pathologies of inner-city populations. The races have separate origins, as explained in the theology of Christian
Identity (a major influence throughout the White racist movement)1: Whites are
the creation of God, who is White; people of color, whom they refer to as the
mud races, have originated in the mating of Whites with animals. Along with
White people and people of color, the world includes a third and very dangerous
species, the Jews, who have resulted from the mating of Eve with the Serpent.
Whites are actual humans and the children of God; Jews are not human but the
children of Satan; and people of color are semihuman. God has created the
world, which the humansWhitesare to rule; the people of color, like cattle
in the field, should not be hated but tolerated and set to work to meet the needs of
the humans. Satan has created the Jews to destroy the Whites and seize the world
for Satan. These two forces, the army of God and the army of Satanthe Whites
and the Jewsare to struggle with each other until one is destroyed. The Israelites of the Old Testament were early Aryans, unrelated to modern Jews; Jesus
thus was an Aryan, not a Jew (Ezekiel, 1995, p. xxvi; Zeskind, 1986).
Most White people, the ideology states, are uninformed about the real
nature of things and believe the soothing and ill-intentioned lies of the Jewcontrolled media. The Jews have made great strides in their war against God,
convincing Whites that they must give up their position of dominance in America and cede privilege and power to the African Americans, the Latinos, the
Asians, the feminists, the gays, and immigrants. Through their domination of
the media, churches, schools, major corporations, and government, the Jews and
their White dupes have succeeded in reducing drastically the power of White
people; the White race now faces its extinction. Only the members of the movement have grasped this truth and are working to awaken and mobilize White
people to defend themselves before the White race has been destroyed. The
54
movement is a defense organization. Members of the movement are very special

people, a minority that is not afraid of the truth, is loyal to God, and is willing to
fight the workings of Satan and his Jews. Movement members are, in fact, the
Chosen People.
The Jews work to destroy the White race through contamination; they call on
Whites to engage in race mixing with Blacks and other races, which will produce a hybrid variety that has lost the White essence and thus the God-given
strength and virtue of the pure Whites. The call to self-destruction is carried by
the media, the churches, and the government, all controlled by the Jews and their
flunkies. Only the White racist movement understands the real meaning of the
ongoing changes in society and in the culture, understands that a single hidden
aim lies behind those seemingly unrelated changes, and that a single hidden
force plans them and brings them about. The Jews, in turn, recognize that only
the White racist movement stands between them and success, and so the Jews
use their organizations, the media, the churches, and the federal government to
attack the White racist movement. To the extent the Jews succeed, Whites are
taught to lose their race pride and movement leaders are sent to prison.
The struggle between Gods agents and Satans agents is a war of annihilation; only one side will survive. Any measure is justifiable in this war for survival. If innocent people die, it is unfortunate but a given in a war of survival.
All this is heard repeatedly in leadership presentations, and its apocalyptic
energy animates the larger movement gatherings. But one wonders how much of
the detail is salient for members on a day-by-day basis. If one listens at length to
ordinary members, one hears pieces of this God-and-Devil story. But what
comes through as central in the members thinking is that Whites are losing
ground, the world is changing, and the member may not do well in the world.
The Whites are losing, and the member is losing. These are people who are
scared and who draw important comfort from being members of a group.
Official ideology in the movement speaks extensively about the characteristics of the target Others, and this is what the general public assumes is the core of
the movement. But, as I shall show in this article, the members teach us that the
actual emotional center of the group is thoughts and feelings about the Self. The
group is valued most for what it can do for the members sense of himself.
GENDER
I say sense of himself because this is a mens movement. Some women are
around but always in quite traditional supportive roles. They are the girlfriends
or wives of members, and at gatherings they can serve the food they have
cooked. In my 7 years around the movement, I heard many speeches, but never
55
one by a woman. I never saw a woman in a leadership role. Women were servants
and nurturers.
Those were the roles open to real women. The men also had their sexualized
fantasies about special women who were imagined as trophies. The drawings in
their publications, like their chatter, suggested a junior high school mindset:
scantily clad women holding AK-47s below their jutting breasts were saving
their love for real men.
HOMOPHOBIA
Fear of homosexual rape was evident; strong Black men who wanted to rape
White women might also commit anal rape on the White adolescent members.
At a less problematic level, there was buy-in to traditional straight American
male attitudes about homosexuality: Gay men and lesbian women were perverts. Contemporary shifts in mainstream attitudes toward understanding were
seen as the results of the Jewish campaign to undermine the strength of the
White race; through their control of the media, the Jews were able to make it
seem as though gay men and lesbian women were ordinary people who should
be accepted rather than people who were violating Gods design. At movement
rallies, people were led repeatedly in the chant, Praise God for AIDS!
TARGETS
At the ideological levelin the writings and speeches of leadersthe contemporary Klan has joined the neo-Nazis in identifying the Jews as the prime
source of evil. Leadership speeches throughout the movement present the Jew
as the central enemy, with African Americans, Latinos, and Asians as the rather
dumb members of the mud races who are pawns of the Jews, as are many
brainwashed Whites. The leadership ranks gay men and lesbian women with
Jews in the enemies list.
Among the rank and file, the picture is more traditional. Most followers
whom I have met exhibited intense prejudice against African Americans that
tended to reflect the general prejudice of their families and neighborhoods. Followers could repeat the party line about the Jews, but my strong impression from
interviews and from watching socialization into the Detroit group was that new
members arrived with strong antipathy toward Blacks but little interest in Jews.
They came in hating Blacks and liking the idea that the movement represented
Whites in a struggle against Blacks; after entry, they had to be taught who the
Jews are and why they should hate them.2
56
LEADERS
There is no White racist movement without its leaders. There are people who
are resentful, people who are needy, people who are adventurers, but by themselves they are not a movement. The leaders, themselves a particular kind of
adventurer, combine charisma, ideology, and organizational capacity to create
White racist groups and, from the groups, the movement.
Racist leaders rise through their own talents. The life stories they tell in the
interviews speak of an initial time of puzzlement and casting about, a point of
enlightenment, a discovered capacity to draw followers, and a determined struggle to bring the truth forward. Some have college degrees, but in essence all are
self-educated with the certainty and the blind spots this entails. The utter certainty is a great deal of their power. The march to prominence has taken place in a
context of competition; the racist organizations are in a constant competition
with one another, and a leader gains importance as his capacity to attract members and media attention grows. The power to attract members comes from the
leaders certainty and his capacity with words and body to be the living expression of the resentment and anger of the listeners. Moreover, he can make his listeners feel that they are part of something that is happening, that these are not
empty words.
In many ways, the leader is operating in a vacuum: Middle-class politicians
and clergy do not speak to this audience. The audience surmises, accurately, that
the Establishment does not see them. The good life seen in advertisements will
not be coming to them; their spokespeople are not on the talk shows; their futures
will have little wealth and less glory. They do not feel respected.
The leader works with this raw material. The leader radically differs from the
medias depiction of him. He is not irrational, and his primary motivation is not
race hatred. He is rational and, in many cases, intelligent. He has a flaw: Within
his self-education, he has rejected mainstream explanations of the social world
and sees himself as one of those original thinkers who is at first scorned but later
will be proven correct; this enables him to ignore pieces of personal experience
that might disconfirm his ideas.
Because his own life course and thinking are fairly unbound by mainstream
assumptions and he is basically self-defined, conspiracy theories are congenial.
Within his self-education, he has rejected a sense of the world as tediously
complicated, as a result of manifold complex interacting forces. He pictures
himself as atomistic and self-determined, and it is logical then that he can
believe great effects are caused by tiny groups of hidden men through hidden
instrumentalities.
In most cases, the leader is not extremely racist. Racism is comfortable for
him, but not his passion. At core, he is a political organizer. His motive is power.
Racism is his tool. He feels most alive when he senses himself influencing men,
affecting them.
57
The interviews with national leaders were lengthy2 or 3 hours, repeated

two, three, or more times. As we sat in interview, the respondent would take calls
on the phone from lieutenants and would also speak to them in person. From
those interactions and from the interviews, a pattern emerged. The leader, usually, is a man who is clever, who is shallow, and who does not respect people. He
thinks almost all people are dumb and easily misled. He thinks almost all people
will act for cold self-interest and will cheat others whenever they think they will
not be caught. His disrespect includes his followers. He respects only those,
friend or foe, who have power. His followers are people to be manipulated, not to
be led to better self-knowledge. He loves, in abstract words, those whom he feels
are disadvantaged. He loves, to this listeners perception, an idea of himself.
As I recall the stories the leaders told me and the things they said to their followers, everything that comes to mind is masculine: The actors in the stories are
masculine; the stories are about combat, domination, and subjugation; the stories are not about nurturance or about cooperative effort that adds new elements,
not about creativity or about tenderness. In a very fundamental way, the world of
the leaders and the followers is an only-masculine world, a world impoverished
of half the range of human feeling and thoughtlike the Army, like prison.
FOLLOWERS
The first years of research were with a Detroit neo-Nazi group that I will call
the Deaths Head Strike Group. The 1995 book tells how I made the contact with
the group and gives portrayals and reflections in depth. The conception of followers that grew from this one group of followers was not contradicted as I met
others at movement gatherings.
The members of the Deaths Head Strike Group were all male, other than the
cell leaders very young lover, who soon left, and several other women who later
chanced by briefly. The group was small, with a nucleus of 7 to 10 members and
10 or 15 others in a looser connection. Still another 10 or 15 friends could be
mobilized for a specific action. Members were young, ranging from 16 to 30,
with a median age of 19. They had come to the group in batches based on friendship clusters. The majority had come from one of three distinct Detroit neighborhoods. People in two of these neighborhoods were extremely poor; the
neighborhoods had once been White but now only two or three White families to
a block remained, the other families being African American. The third neighborhood was half White and half Black, with families ranging from workingclass downwarda struggling but not destitute neighborhood.
Almost every Strike Group member (18 of 20 who were interviewed) had lost
a parent when young; usually the loss was of a father (16 of 18). Most of the
losses (15 of 18) were due to divorce or separation. The other 3 were due to death
or to causes that had never been revealed to the child. The median age at time of
58
loss was 7. The fathers had been working men. After leaving, they maintained no
contact with the child or the family and did not send money to the home. Stepfathers or transient boyfriends of the mother tended to be cold, rough, and abusive.
Several members had spent portions of their childhood in foster homes.
A few members spoke spontaneously of parental alcoholism or violence; a
few others were responsive when I asked questions. Seven members reported
alcoholism, six reported family violence. Seven members spontaneously mentioned serving time at detention centers, jails, or prisons. I suspect, from the stories involving street fights and the hints about drug use and pilfering, that there
was more undisclosed penal time.
There was little money in the homes. Most of the mothers worked as cooks or
waitresses in small eating places or drew disability payments. Most of the members had no jobs and no prospect of work. A couple had steady work at low
wages; a few found occasional work in the neighborhood, for example, tearing
down a shack for someone. Industrial employment in Detroit was shrinking rapidly, and the prospects for these young men were very poor, especially because
they had little work experience or education. They had left school early. The
school history of 16 members is known. Six had quit school in the 9th grade, 3 in
the 10th, and 4 in the 11th. The 3 who had graduated from high school had each
taken a semester or two at a community college.
These young men were living in startling social isolation. The impact of
parental loss and poverty depends on the sort of parenting by the remaining parent and on the quality of other social supports. Aside from their mothers, about
whom little is known, social supports were minimal. Ties to siblings tended to be
weak or nonexistent, and only one member spoke of someone from the extended
family who had played a role in his life. None ever mentioned a teacher who had
been important to him, or a coach or scout leader, or anyone from a church, the
neighborhood, or a social agency.
The members had grown up in neighborhoods in which they had to fight a lot.
This would have not been easy because most of them were fairly slim, rather
slight. They depended on fighting real hard, once something broke out. They
were wiry and tough, but preoccupied with their thinness.
They were not good physical specimens. A surprising number had been born
with a childhood disease or deficiency, such as being born a blue baby or born
with half a liver. There are a lot of hospital stories in the interviews.
Very early in the interviewing, I sensed an underlying theme of fear. At an
unspoken but deep level, the members seemed to feel extremely vulnerable, that
their lives might be snuffed out at any time like a match flame in the wind. This
makes the appeal of the Nazi symbols understandable. When I asked them what
they knew about Nazism, they referred to late-night movies on television. If you
are afraid that you will disappear, how appealing are the symbols of a force that
was hard, ruthless, even willing to murder to achieve its goals.
None of the members could establish a long-term intimate relationship. Several had caused pregnancies, but neither they nor the cell leader was able to
59
establish a fathering role. Eventually, two of the members did become seriously
involved with women, one of them fathering a child; each of these young men
drifted from the group as he became involved. One of them soon was living with
his woman friend and held down both a full-time job and a part-time job, where
he began to have friendly bonds with some of his African American coworkers;
he abandoned the Strike Group.
The group did not have conventional meetings; rather, the members hung out
at the leaders apartment. Periodically, they were transported in the windowless
rear of a rented Ryder van to some outlying town where they would put on a rally
for a few minutes until counterdemonstrators drove them away. I think this
action also assuaged their fears. If you are not quite sure that you are alive, how
reassuring to stand shoulder to shoulder with your comrades, withstanding for a
few minutes the taunts, threats, and hurled snowballs, chunks of ice, and flashlight batteries of the counterdemonstrators. When the police quickly shepherded
them safely back to their van, they rode back to Detroit, and, that afternoon and
for weeks thereafter, rejoiced in rather inflated memories of their courage, feasting their eyes repeatedly on newspaper photos.
BECOMING A NEO-NAZI
How does a working-class kid in Detroit become a neo-Nazi? What are the
factors that make adolescents vulnerable to recruitment by racist organizers?
Figure 1 is a schematized representation of factors suggested by the interviews.
Social factors, listed on the left, intersect with personal and family psychodynamics. A range of alternative outcomes, shown on the right, may follow.
The tally of social factors begins by noting the presence of a racist group.
Where there are no groups and where there is no effort at recruitment, recruitment is probably unlikely. Every young person who has been recruited stands for
hundreds of others who just as readily might have been recruited if there had
been an organization on the scene.
Many of the Detroit youths I met with had written away for membership
cards in the Klan when they were in junior high school. This was a mail transaction that gave them a card to carry in their back pockets, with whatever boost that
gave their egos as they moved about in the racially mixed schools in which they
were the minority. They could not recall how they had found out about this mailorder opportunity. They later heard about the Detroit neo-Nazi group because it
got a lot of publicity on Detroit television. Occasional placards shown on the
video clips included the groups phone number, so they could call its leader.
After meeting with him a few times, they would start coming around regularly.
When one joined, a couple of friends usually followed.
The growing number of White racist Web sites on the Internet make racist
propaganda widely accessible. Monitoring organizations fear that this will aid
recruitment (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2000b, 2001a; Weitzman, 1998,
60
Presence of
Racist Group
Differential Outcomes,
such as:
Social Dislocation
ordinary coping
Economic Pressure (?)
numbness
Social Isolation
malaise
alcoholism
Racist Ideology
Macho Ideology
Family
Dynamics,
Personal
Psychodynamics
chronic anger
individual
violence
racist activism
Absence of
Democratic Ideology
Absence of
Cross-Cutting
Loyalties
Figure 1: Schematized Representation of Suggested Factors Influencing a Youth

Becoming a White Racist Activist
2000). Data are absent, and some are skeptical (Southern Poverty Law Center,
2001b).
The diagrams second social factor is social dislocation. Widespread
changes in American society mean that previous status hierarchies are disrupted
or threatened. (Note parallels to developments in Weimar Germany [Kershaw,
1998].) Most members of the American White racist movement believe that
they, as White men, are members of an endangered species. Very little about
their futures can be taken for granted. Many cues tell them that old values, which
they have assumed would benefit them for life, are challenged by new values.
Real social change is involved here, as well as exaggerated perceptions of
change and endangerment.
White Americans have made only an awkward accommodation to the
increased political strength of African Americans. The work of Howard Schuman
and his associates addresses the complexity of this issue: Looking at surveys of
probability samples over decades, they found White Americans verbally
endorsing some egalitarian values, while steadfastly opposing concrete steps
that would implement those values (Schuman, Steeb, Bobo, & Krysan, 1997).
61
In early versions of this diagram, I listed economic pressure as a social factor.

People that I met seemed to come from families with incomes below the median
and sometimes well below the median. I am no longer confident that my impressions justify a claim linking economic factors to membership in racist groups.
Several lines of research challenge this assumption. First, Leonard Zeskind (personal communication, autumn 1994), whom I consider the most astute political
observer of the White racist movement, believes that the movement is a representative cross-section of American society. Second, James Aho (1990), in a
careful study of the movement in Idaho, found educational levels that did not
suggest economic pressures. (Interestingly, he noted that respondents in the
more extreme portion of the sample seem either to be college graduates or high
school dropouts.) (p. 141.)
Finally, a strong set of new studies from Yale casts doubt on a linkage
between economic status and racist group membership or racist crime. The most
impressive of the Yale studies (Green, Strolovitch, & Wong, 1998) demonstrated that the number of bias-crime incidents in New York City neighborhoods
between 1987 and 1995 was not related to neighborhood economic status
(unemployment rate, poverty rate, or median income) but to turf patterns:
Racially motivated crime rose when there was a rise in non-White migration into
neighborhoods in which Whites had for a long time enjoyed a large majority. A
second study (Green, Abelson, & Garnett, 1999) examined responses from a
probability sample of North Carolinians about political and economic matters.
Elegant procedures permitted the inclusion of an identified subsample composed of members of White supremacist groups and of hate crime perpetrators.
(Unfortunately, this subsample is small.) Although the two populations differ
predictably in political views, the subsamples more negative view of the economic condition and prospects of their communities differs from the general
populations assessment to a degree that is only small to moderate (p. 447). A
third study (Green, Glaser, & Rich, 1998) readdresses, with more sophisticated
techniques, historical data on lynchings and economic changes and found little
robust support for a frustration-aggression hypothesis. Interestingly, the ensuing
discussion highlights a more nuanced conception of the linkage of economics
and racist activity: The authors point to historical periods in which propagandists from the political, business, or labor communities mobilized racial hostility by identifying a racial group as the cause of economic problemsan analysis
that parallels this articles characterization of the White racist leaders as people
who are fundamentally political beings.
Despite the power of the Yale studies, this issue may not be conclusively settled. We are dealing with groups with secret memberships, and the historical
record in Weimar Germany, dramatically commands attention (Kershaw, 1998).
The third social factor is social isolation, which has been discussed at length
above. The importance of social support has been widely studied; see, for example, the discussion of social support in Cohen and Herberts 1996 review of
62
health psychology. The young men in the Strike Group may or may not have
been close to their mothers, but the lack of other meaningful adults meant
unusual vulnerability. The racist group offered comradeship, authority figures,
and a home to young people who lived in what might be termed spiritual
poverty.
The fourth and fifth social factors are racist ideology and macho ideology.
These help determine the direction that the conversion process takes. The ideology of racism, which was passed on to the new member by the group leader and
reinforced in conversations with other members, gives the new recruit a continuing sense that there is an important reason for the group to exist. This is more
than a casual friendship group. The movement makes its claim, in the ideology,
to a turf and declares its role as defending that turf. The members struck me as
people who felt rather orphaned, and the racist ideology permits the member to
construct in his mind a new family, the mythologized White race. In the members conversations, we hear the fantasy that someday this great White family
will realize what he has done for them and then they will embrace him.
Macho ideology is a familiar presence in authoritarian movements (Adorno,
Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950; Smith, 1965; Stone, Lederer, &
Christie, 1993). This is an ideology of pseudomasculinity, an ideology that glorifies toughness and fears tenderness or nurturance as weakness. This stance
buttresses the ego of shaky male individuals; it can be especially important to
adolescents, and in this case, we are speaking of particularly fearful adolescents.
The listing of social factors concludes by noting absences: the absence of
democratic ideology as a real part of the mental life of the youths, and the
absence of cross-cutting loyalties that might make exclusivist appeals uncomfortable. Research relevant to the latter appears in Urban and Miller (1998) and
Marcus-Newhall, Miller, Holz, and Brewer (1993). The two absences become
apparent when one asks how it can be that these young people do not experience
revulsion when presented with the authoritarian and racist worldviews that are
the center of the recruitment process. What is not there that one might expect?
The absences, as we shall see, have direct implications for prevention of
recruitment.
The diagram assumes that the impact of the social forces depends on the particular characteristics of the individuals psyche and the dynamics in the individuals family. Psychodynamics are examined by Dunbar (2000), Dunbar, Krop,
and Sullaway (2000), Hopf (1993), Staub (1989), and Sullivan and Transue
(1996). Staub covered historical and social issues as well as psychodynamics.
Dunbar, et al. (2000) compared men convicted of racist homicide to men convicted of nonracist homicide.
Hopfs (1993) review of qualitative and clinical work on authoritarians and
their families yields psychological portraits that fit the neo-Nazi youth of the
Strike Group to a startling degree. On pages 128 to 130, she reconstructs
Ackerman and Jahodas 1950 study. Ackerman and Jahoda interviewed psychoanalysts at length about anti-Semitic non-Jewish patients in their caseloads. The
63
following characteristics were described as universal for these anti-Semitic

patients:
1. A vague feeling of fear, linked to an inner picture of the world around them that
appears to be hostile, evil, and difficult to master;
2. A shaky self-image, identity problems, and fluctuations between overestimation
of self and self-derogation;
3. Difficulties in interpersonal relationships manifested in part in a high degree of
isolation and hidden in part behind functioning facades. But at best such disguises deceive the outer world and sometimes the self; they never lead to the establishment of warm, human relationships (Ackerman & Jahoda, 1950, p. 33);
4. The tendency to conform and fear of attracting attention;
5. Problems in coping with reality; often there are weak bonds not only to other persons but also to external objects (content of work, occupation in leisure time, and
so forth);
6. Problems in the development of an autonomous set of ethics.
Hopfs review leads one back to the qualitative chapters of The Authoritarian
Personality (Adorno et al., 1950). Indeed, the entire Stone et al. volume and
Smiths 1965 data argue for readdressing the central concepts of the Berkeley
research (also see Smiths 1997 review). Note, on the other hand, a strong, recent
dissent by Martin (2001), who argued that even in the qualitative sections, the
members of the Berkeley group were fatally naive in their methodology, fell into
systematic error because they had reified scale positions as existing human
types, and consistently misinterpreted data in a self-serving fashion.
In either case, the psychological has consequence. The diagram proposes that
in the presence of the stipulated social factors, some people of particular personal and family psychological patterns will enter into a period of activism in the
White racist movement. The diagram proposes as well that small differences in
the social and individual inputs will result in quite a range of possible outcomes.
One can well imagine people who might become lonely cranks, or drunkards, or
even quite ordinarily competent adults. The devil, as always, is in the details.
PREVENTION
PERSONAL CONNECTION
What would make individual White adolescents less vulnerable to the

recruitment efforts of neo-Nazi and Klan organizers? Recall the social isolation
of the Detroit youths. During those repeated interactions, I became aware that
warmth was increasing between us, despite my identifying myself as a Jew and a
progressive.
I had my own personal issues. On a pivotal afternoon very early in the project,
I was driving to Detroit to continue our conversations and thinking about the life
of one of the young men. I had been getting a sense of what his life had been and
64
what its onward trajectory was likely to be. What could be done, I asked myself,
that would help him have a more competent sense of himself, that would encourage him to take a firmer grasp on his lifeto begin to understand that his life
mattered and that it could be directed in a hopeful way? I pondered and abruptly
shook myself: What am I doing, worrying about a Nazi? I thought about it.
And then from my gut came the reply: He is also a kid. It cannot be wrong to be
concerned about a kid.
The neo-Nazi youths were reacting to me as well. Their greetings, their
remarks, and their bearing showed that I was becoming a person who mattered to
them. That made sense. I would sit and speak with an individual for a long time,
talking with him about his life, taking his life seriously, looking into his eyes as
we spoke. This happened again and again. Probably no one had acted that way
with these youths for a long time.
This sort of interaction may be a critical ingredient in programs that address
the needs of disadvantaged kids. Every child needs an adult who sees him or her:
an adult who does not disappear, who shows by attention and action over time
that he or she takes the child seriously and that the child matters.
This is not an elegant formula. It is labor-intensive and lacks multiplier
effects. But it may be fundamental. In addition to macro-economic changes, perhaps we need direct personal action if we are to reduce the amount of youth violence, of teenage pregnancy, of youthful gang activity, of racist activity, and of
all the other ways that disadvantaged youths hurt themselves and others. We perhaps should tithe ourselvesa tithing of time for children in need of relationships. See in this connection the discussions of mentoring in Freedman (1993)
and in Tierney and Grossman (2000).
COMMUNITY
Complementary ways in which we could address the social isolation of

youths such as these tie to the word community. Research with the Peace Corps
and experience in teaching have convinced me of the power of context: Given a
meaningful challenge that is difficult but not insuperable, within an artful combination of structure and freedom, young people can mature and become competent to a degree that would not be predicted from a simple examination of their
past (Ezekiel, 1969; Smith, 1966). These lessons were in my mind as I interacted
with the neo-Nazi youth and asked myself about alternative scenarios that could
have been played out in their lives. They were neither mindless nor hate-filled.
They were poorly educated and fearful at the core. What they wanted profoundly
was to have close relationships and to feel that their lives mattered.
The Nazi group offered them this feeling to a degree and for a while, but other
endeavors could probably have done this as well or better. I thought I probably
could have led many of them away from their leader (because I was a warmer
person and cared more for them) to some other group. But what other group
would fit their needs? The best fit, I felt, would be a radical environmental group
65
such as Earth First. Such a group would have given them adventure and a chance
to shock the Establishment, while doing something of intrinsic value and enjoying camaraderie. Earth Firsts goals would have jibed with the anticorporate bias
of the youths and with their romanticism about the outdoors. Working in that
organization would not have particularly affected the racial prejudice these kids
harbored, but it would have met their need to act out in a shocking and socially
relevant fashion while gaining group affection. The youths probably would have
remained racistbut so would their peers who did not wear swastikas. The point
is that these young people seemed to have no intrinsic need to act out their racism
but did have needs to have companionship, to be shocking, and to feel that their
lives had meaning.
Community organizations could build much more broadly on the similar
hungers of great numbers of kids, who could learn community in contexts of
challenge. Our culture tends to relegate young people to roles that are neither
meaningful nor honorific. What is the significance of being overindulged or
socialized to see oneself primarily as a consumer? What scope do we offer an
adolescent who wishes to prove his or her significance in the world? Churches,
synagogues, mosques, neighborhood organizations, scouting organizations,
and political or ethnic organizations could begin to build youth groups in which
there was serious challenge; there are plenty of hard and meaningful tasks to be
taken on. A critical need, again, would be for adult leadership that would not
fade out.
SCHOOLS, DEMOCRACY, ANTIRACIST EDUCATION
Schools, like community groups, may play a role. The youths I met had first
become involved in racist activity in junior high school. Their prior (and subsequent) schooling had not led them to harbor a concept of community. The classroom had seldom been shaped as a community in which class members had felt
mutual responsibility for one another. On the contrary, the classroom probably
had reflected the desperation and the atomization of the society outside the
school.
Equally, the schools had left no feel for democracy. The youths had no positive association to the word, which seemed to them a meaningless term used by
adults for hypocritical purposes. School had afforded little chance for real
impact on decisions that mattered, opportunities to learn in action the meaning
of the word democracy. Both community and democracy can be taught through
experience in the classroom, when schools consider these goals part of the curriculum and invest energy in building related skills.
For the neo-Nazi youths, the teaching in school of multiculturalism had been
another adult exercise in hypocrisy. Black History Month was an annual annoyance. It is easy for an adult-led discussion to seem like sermonizing. I would suggest that education about racism should begin with respect for the constructs and
emotions that the students bring with them into the classroom. The students have
66
ideas and emotions about race that are the product of their own lives. They have
heard their parents, their neighbors, and their friends, and they have had their
own experiences. To ignore their emotions and constructs around race is to
ignore the sense that they make of their own experiences.3
Teaching about racism, I want to suggest, is a subtopic of teaching about
identity. Perhaps the first step is to help the student think through his or her own
sense of identity and to look for its roots. What was the life of your grandparents
and what does that life tell you about yourself? What are the legends or myths in
your familywhy is it special to be a Kelly or a Krueger? What has been the
experience of religion that you have heard about from your parents, and what has
been your own experiencehow have these helped to make you the person you
are? Young people, regardless of race or ethnicity, should be helped to see where
their own sense of identity comes from and how it affects their own lives. And to
see its many different facets. Only then can the student begin to acknowledge
that other people also have a sense of identity, and that it also had multiple roots.
And also plays a role in their lives.
HOW DO WE RESEMBLE THEM?

HOW DO WE DIFFER?
It is fashionable to repeat Walt Kellys Pogo: We have met the enemy, and
they are us. And it is worth noting that the neo-Nazis are not totally alien to
White Americans. A social attitude does not exist in the mind as an isolated single entity. Real attitudes, or orientations, are laid down throughout life in layer
after layer. If you visited South Africa and spoke with older White South Africans, you would expect to find their minds affected by having grown up in a society that was intensely racist. White Americans grow up in a society in which race
has been and is profoundly important.
If I grow up living next to a cement factory and inhale cement dust every day,
cement dust becomes part of my body. If I am White and grow up in a society in
which race matters, I inhale racism, and racism becomes part of my mind and
spirit. (I do not presume to speak here for the experience of people of color.)
There will always be layers of myself that harbor racist thoughts and racist attitudes. This is not to say that those must remain the dominant parts of my mind
and spirit. It is to say that it is mistaken to presume that I have no traces of racism
in me.
The task is to get acquainted with those layers of oneselfto learn to recognize them and not be frightened by them. It is not a disgrace to have absorbed
some racism. It is a disgrace not to know it and to let those parts of ourselves go
unchecked.
I overcome those layers of myself by getting acquainted with them and by
adding additional layers that are not racist. How do I do that? By action: I try to
67
behave in a nonracist fashion or an antiracist fashion in the external world and

absorb this experience as another layer of myself.
There is perhaps a parallel in clinical work. In therapy, I may learn to recognize the parts of me that were shaped by early experience with my parents (or,
rather, what my childish mind thought was early experience with my parents). I
learn to understand that in some circumstancesfor example, in a disagreement
with a superiorpieces of those early attitudes are likely to get activated. I can
learn to think about this before going into the bosss office, and prepare myself
not to be blindsided by infantile parts of myself that are not relevant to the situation at hand. And, over time, I can add layers of nondefensive experience to my
psyche.
If, then, those of us who are White have grown up in the same society as the
racists and have absorbed some of the same cement dust, are we the same as
them? The organized White racist movement rests on the following four axioms:
that race is real, that White is best, that the language of human interactions is
power, and that societys surface conceals conspiracy. We European Americans
have layers of ourselves that also hold the first two of those axioms. We may
have been taught in school that race is merely a social construct and that White
superiority is a myth. But that teaching runs up against what we are taught by our
lives, every day. Race does matter in America. And White ends up on top.
We can learn to not be captive to the layers of ourselves that are racist. Am I
racist? is not the question. The question is, To what degree am I racist in what
situations? And the more important question, What are the concrete effects of
my actions (or inactions)? In the 1970s, my interviews with African American
families in the Detroit inner-city included interactions with a woman named
Ruby and her children (Ezekiel, 1984). Ruby lived on 12th Street (as it was then
named), and her children had cornflakes with water for their daily breakfast.
Ruby and her children were real; the contrasts between their lives and mine were
painful. I learned to ask myself, when people spoke on the radio or at the university about a program or a policy, how it would affect Rubys children: Would it
help them to have milk with their cornflakes, or would they keep on eating cornflakes with water?
THE GUILT OF THE ORGANIZED RACISTS

Between Reconstruction and 1945, 3,000 to 5,000 African American men
and women were tortured and killed by lynch mobs. The Ku Klux Klan was a
dominant force behind those killings. Local officials were often themselves
Klansmen but, in any case, did not obstruct the Klan. During the civil rights
struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, Klansmen instigated mob assaults on Freedom
Riders and the like, and carried out bombings and murders of activistsor of little girls in a churchunder cover of darkness. Organized White racism has a
68
long and bloody history. Its goal has been to preserve White domination in
America. Its primary weapon has been terror.
The Klan and neo-Nazi groups hold a different position today. Town and
county officials are much less likely to be secret members and are much less
likely to be cowed by overt White racist demands. To this writers perception,
White racism remains a major strand in American culture, but as a political
force, it has expressed itself more often as a covert message within mainstream
politics. Major presidential candidates have not hesitated to win support by suggesting that too much is being done for the undeserving poor, a code word for
African Americans. Demonization of the poor has proceeded apace, buttressed
by an almost unspoken assumption (a statistically inaccurate assumption) that
most of the poor are non-Whites. This demonization may have served as a distracting cover for a reapportionment of wealth from middle-income families
upwards (Collins & Yeskel, 2000).
Probably the greatest effect of White racism today is its capacity to slow institutional change. Policies that help institutional racism to continue to flourish do
much more to hurt minority people than do hate crimes. High infant mortality
rates in the inner cities and policies that let them continue are more dangerous
than the Klan.
Actual hate crimes, for the most part, are committed by people who are not
members of organized White racist groups (Dunbar, 2000; Dunbar et al., 2000).
Deep racial distrust and antipathy mark our culture and would exist without the
dramatic statements and demonstrations of the White racist groups. But the
statements and the rallies of those groups increase the temperature, and the
advocacy of specific steps pinpoints actions that perpetrators can take.
The leaders and the lieutenants of those groups are morally responsible to a
nontrivial degree for racial violence in the United States (a responsibility they
gladly claim in private conversation). Indeed, the future for which they avowedly work is one in which racial violence increases until the long predicted race
war erupts and White America wins back its God-ordained dominance. The followers in the groups, the willing actors in the theater produced by the leaders,
share in that moral responsibility. And of course, where leaders or followers
have committed crimes, they are fully responsible.
RACISM, HATE CRIMES, AND RESPONSIBILITY

I chose to talk with members and leaders of White racist organizations as part
of a broader project of understanding White racism in America. I have gained
the impression, since publication of The Racist Mind, that more and more of the
general public and the educated public are letting the task of talking about hate
crimes displace from the agenda the task of thinking about racism.
Perhaps this is not surprising. You and I do not commit racial assaults, and no
one we know does. It is interesting and unthreatening to imagine the world of
69
those other people, whoever they may be, who engage in racist violence. And
how nice if that form of contemplation can also be the only price White people
have to pay for living in an unjust society. So that the more indignant and outraged I can be about the evils of the Klan and neo-Nazis, the more virtuous I can
feel. And the more virtuous I feel about their misdeeds, the less I need to listen to
tiresome critics who talk about racism and the need for institutional changes.
If I were to think about the true and continuing effects of racism, I would have
to think about the ongoing social order, in which I am a part and for which I have
responsibility. All of us are ready to say that Klan murders are evil. But what are
we ready to do, today, about the continuing racially based maldistribution of
health, of wealth, and of hope?
NOTES
1. A recent report suggested that the influence of Christian identity in the movement is in decline,
being replaced, especially among young members, by racial Odinism (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2001c).
2. In interviews, speeches, and conversations, nothing was said about Catholics or the Catholic
Church.
3. The teacher must proceed, I think, with some humility. It is not unreasonable for a White
American kid to have absorbed some racism. That young person is growing up in a fairly racist societythat is, a society in which race strongly affects life chances (health, longevity, income, wealth).
He or she hears on all sides conversations in which race is an emotionally charged subject. He or she
lives, often, in a neighborhood that is segregated by race. This young person learns over and over that
race matters in America. To preach to an adolescent that race does not matter, or that we should act as
though it does not matter, rightly invites skepticism. Teachers need to wrestle in their own minds and
guts with these issues before trying to educate others. Are teachers ready to be honest with children
about the actual state of our society and to talk honestly about the steps that may need to happen for
the society to be less racist? This may require talking about economics, the great unspeakable in our
culture. Teachers may need to spend time in protected settings, working through their own understanding; they may also need to do a fair amount of reading. Simple preaching is not going to accomplish the task (Ezekiel, 1998, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c).
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The Racist Mind in Society

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American Behavioral Scientist

AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

EZEKIEL / THE RACIST MIND REVISITED

AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

movement is a defense organization. Members of the movement are very special

EZEKIEL / THE RACIST MIND REVISITED

AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

EZEKIEL / THE RACIST MIND REVISITED

The interviews with national leaders were lengthy2 or 3 hours, repeated

AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

EZEKIEL / THE RACIST MIND REVISITED

AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

Figure 1: Schematized Representation of Suggested Factors Influencing a Youth

EZEKIEL / THE RACIST MIND REVISITED

In early versions of this diagram, I listed economic pressure as a social factor.

AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

EZEKIEL / THE RACIST MIND REVISITED

following characteristics were described as universal for these anti-Semitic

What would make individual White adolescents less vulnerable to the

AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

Complementary ways in which we could address the social isolation of

EZEKIEL / THE RACIST MIND REVISITED

AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

HOW DO WE RESEMBLE THEM?

EZEKIEL / THE RACIST MIND REVISITED

behave in a nonracist fashion or an antiracist fashion in the external world and

THE GUILT OF THE ORGANIZED RACISTS

AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

RACISM, HATE CRIMES, AND RESPONSIBILITY

EZEKIEL / THE RACIST MIND REVISITED

AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

EZEKIEL / THE RACIST MIND REVISITED

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